It is the best of times, it is the worst of times

It seems as if not a week passes without some new development in the book industry, mainly predicting the death of the physical book. Only a few made me sit up and notice. First, a story early this month said that Barnes and Noble may be put up for sale. That is serious shit. Then there was the story of the coming liquidation of the Good Book Guide, a service I used to love and rely on in the seventies and the eighties. Finally, what Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in his SPIEGEL interview about how 'The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come'

But  have a confession. I own an iPad, and I have downloaded books. I have been watching what I do and I notice that I am only interested in the classics, and that too, classic books for children. (No, they are not for my granddaughter as some have suggested.) No book on the front list has appealed to me so far. Besides, most of the classics are free. So when I am on holiday, I will have my collection of music, DVDs, games, internet browser and email client, and a few other odds and ends that I can bring along without paying for excess baggage.

Sale of Barnes and Noble

The board of directors of Barnes & Noble have announced that it is  considering a sale of the largest bookstore chain in the US. The company operates 777 stores in all fifty US states in addition to 636 college bookstores, serving nearly four million students and two hundred and fifty thousand faculty members across the country.

Barnes & Noble originated in 1873 when Charles Barnes opened a book-printing business in Illinois. Their first true bookstore was set up by his son, William, in partnership with G. Clifford Noble, in 1917 in New York. The business was sold, in 1971, to Leonard Riggio. In 1975, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore to discount books, by selling best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers’ list price.

The blogosphere is in a frenzy with many predicting the final end of the brick and mortar retailers (again).

The Good Book Guide calls in liquidators

News last week says that the Good Book Guide has called in insolvency practitioners to deal with the liquidation of the company because they "can't satisfy its debts as they fall due". The company is holding meetings with creditors and shareholders on September 1.

It is understood that reviewers for the monthly book recommendations magazine are among those who have not been paid, but it is not clear if there were any publishers among the creditors. No issue of the Guide has been published since April.

The Good Book Guide started in the seventies as a mail-order bookseller, supported by a recommendation magazine with hundreds of reviews by professional reviewers every month. With the advent of the internet, they became an online retailer, still publishing the recommendations magazine monthly. Obviously, they couldn’t compete with the behemoths like Amazon.

The printed book will dominate

A headline 'The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come' caught my eye recently. It was a SPIEGEL interview with Mr Markus Dohle, 42, CEO of Random House, the largest publishing company in the world. I decided to renew my faith. I came across a few gems there which I shall produce verbatim below:

SPIEGEL: Did you work your way through the literary canon in preparation?
Dohle: There was no time for that. I was set up in the United States within a few days. It went very quickly. And when I started the new position, I was in the process of reading the Random House book "You're in Charge -- Now What?" It was certainly appropriate reading material.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you worried about embarrassing yourself while making small talk about literature with authors and agents?
Dohle: I do happen to have 15 Frankfurt Book Fairs under my belt and have spent my entire professional life in the book business at Bertelsmann. I've met plenty of major authors and publishers in the process. The book industry is a very creative environment. Ultimately, however, it's about making money with books.

Now we can all panic. The death of the music industry was caused by publishers who didn’t know or listen to the music they sold. The publishing industry now has Mr Markus Dohle.

Publisher’s Weekly
The Bookseller
The Spiegel

Recommending books

I read a column recently by Laura Miller of Salon.com about the Art of Recommending Book that led me to think how easy that was when we were young. My entire childhood experience was about sharing books and music. Have you read this, have you heard that? It was a time when one didn’t have to worry about books coming back because they usually did. (Stealing from friends started later in the teen years, a habit that often stretched to adulthood.) So stacks of The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Hardy Boy -- the boys never read Nancy Drew for some reason, we were sexist that way -- and Biggles (to name a few) changed hands rapidly. Later, it was Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris (whose real name was Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin and was born in Singapore), Micky Spillane, Earl Stanley Gardner, Ian Fleming -- gosh, there were so many. Then all that stopped as if the music suddenly died. So, what happened? I have wondered about that. I suspect what happened was adulthood.

Laura Miller says: ‘Amazon and other online merchants have harnessed mighty algorithms to run their "If you enjoyed that, you might like this ..." suggestion engines, but these are still crude instruments.’ Interestingly, I have not bought a single book recommended to me by a robot in the last ten years I have been buying a from Amazon. But then, I might be the freak here. Is there a survey to show the percentage of buyers who purchase the books that are suggested? Or is it only a ‘nice’ feature?

Then there are the Booker and Whitbread (now Costa) book awards. Unfortunately, it has been several years since I have been excited by anything on their lists. I don’t think I am alone, though. A story on The Telegraph which I reported here says (to summarise): only Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach did well (according to Nielsen BookScan August 18 figures) selling 110, 615 copies. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist sold 2918 copies and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip,2802 copies. In fact, the five finalists' combined sales, besides Ian McEwan's, came to 10,155 copies. (These figures were released before the winner was announced.) Maybe it was an unusual year, but I think not. The figure seem to suggest that books by the usual suspects still sell. Is the role of Booker Prize (and other such awards) as the arbiter of good taste in books, over then?

So what turns readers on? Newspapers, magazine and blogs? As a bookseller for ten years, I’d say that the impact of reviews are minimal, except to create awareness. Yes, there are those who come in with cutouts of reviews, bestseller lists or titles they read about, but these are a minority. What does get a book going are the word-of-mouth recommendation. “This book is damn chun man. You have to read it,” as we did when we were kids. Or if it’s a book the government has made a fuss over, like Chin Peng or The Malaysian Maverick. (That never hurts sales.)

As an independent bookshop, one of our functions is to recommend books. This is the part we enjoy the most, particularly when the customer comes back for more. Having said that, recommending books is an art. We normally start with two questions: “What are you reading now?” and, “Who are your favourite authors?” The answers to these help narrow things down considerably. Then the next question will be, “Do want something similar or would you like to try something a little different?” At this point you might detect a little panic in some cases, because of the word ‘different’. “What are these weirdos going to suggest now?” People do like things to remain the same. Forever. That’s why books by usual suspects continue to sell, and that’s why publishers continue to churn them out.

The other problem is -- and one can blame the Booker and other prize committees for it -- the idea that good books are either difficult to read, boring or both. Unfortunately, this notion is also promoted by many literary types, especially reviewers. Our first criteria for a good read is the story. Second comes the part that is a source of much debate and disagreement: is it well written? We have discussed this in our previous posts. We like simple straightforward language. Elegance is a bonus. Ostentatious and overly florid language will be regarded the same as Corinthian columns in Taman Melawati: with disdain. Third, is added value -- is it a slice of life, a comment on the human condition, or does it contain little known information?

Good books are certainly not difficult to read, but not all readers are equal. Some read more than others. So throwing someone into the deep end is not helpful regardless of how much we like a particular book.

Salon.com